Ingeborg Bachmann

June 25, 1926, Klagenfurt, Austria – October 17, 1973, Rome, Italy

“No new world without a new language.” Ingeborg Bachmann, The Thirtieth Year: Stories

Ingeborg Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt, Carinthia as the first child of the school teacher Mathias Bachmann and his wife Olga. After completing secondary school in Klagenfurt, Ingeborg studied philosophy, psychology all over Austria before she settled down in Vienna.

Early on she displayed exceptional gifts as a writer of dense prose and mellifluous lyrics, demonstrating keen awareness of political conflict and a sensitivity to cultural differences. In 1951, she started working as an editor at the radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot. The job enabled Bachmann to obtain an overview of contemporary literature and also supplied her with a decent income. Furthermore, her first radio plays were published by the station.

In 1952, she managed her lyrical breakthrough with a reading at the "Gruppe 47", a loose confederation of writers known for their ardent interest in theory and debate. From 1957 to 1963, during the time of her troubled relationship with Swiss author Max Frisch, Bachmann alternated between Zurich and Rome, eventually settling down in Rome. She rejected marriage as “an impossible institution. Impossible for a woman who works and thinks and wants something for herself”.

In 1961, her partly autobiographic collection of short stories Das dreißigste Jahr (The Thirtieth Year) was published, in which she criticized post-war society. In 1971, she wrote her first novel Malina, taking on a very introverted stance and exploring the possibilities of subjective 'female writing' long before feminism pocketed the concept. Malina was part of her unfinished project Todesarten (Ways of Dying). Her poetry collections Gestundete Zeit (Deferred Time) and Anrufung des Großen Bären (Invocation of the Great Bear) were highly successful.

However, her novels Der Fall Franza (Franza's Case) and Requiem für Fanny Goldmann (Requiem for Fanny Goldmann) where published posthumously and in fragments only. The last published work during her lifetime was Simultan (1972), a volume of prose narratives, unties in its title Bachmann’s major cultural interests: Salvic and Italian themes expressed by unnamed protagonists who traverse countries, communicate in different languages, and work as translators. In 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died, because she fell asleep smoking in her bed. She was 47 years old.

She taught at Harvard University and the University of Frankfurt. Her honors include membership in the West Berlin Academy of Arts, an Austrian National Medal, and a Georg Büchner Prize from the German Academy for Language and Literature. One of Austria's major annual literary awards was named in her honor Ingeborg Bachmann price. Some of her short stories and radio plays have been turned into movies.

An obsessive reader and compulsive writer, fluent in four languages, intimately familiar with most countries of Western Europe, Bachmann encompasses and transforms these experiences in her works. Her sombre, surreal writings often deal with women in failed love relationships, the nature of art and humanity, and the inadequacy of language.

In our library, you find following books by Ingeborg Bachmann, audiobooks of her works and books on her life and works:

McMurtry, Áine: Crisis and form in the later writing of Ingeborg Bachmann, an aesthetic examination of the poetic drafts of the 1960s. Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012. VIII, 250 S.
ISBN: 9781907322396